Does the revenue from a theme decrease or stay the same over time.

I’ve been planning to create a wordpress theme for themeforest, but I need to if there is enough inventive here or not, in terms of revenue. I’ve seen some themes making the amount of money in one month, that I would be happy to make as well, but I need to know if the income is regular or that it decreases and how fast does it decrease.

For example, one theme sold 400 copies in one month, will it sell the similar amount in the next month or will it sell any less?

Please let me know about this as it will really help determine if I want to get into this. Thank you very much.

If you think in terms of a single product then yes. Your theme may become outdated and be replaced eventually. But the theme you upload is not a single end product in my opinion. You have the option to constantly update, re-design, improve and fix your theme so basically version 2 of a theme can be a completely different product. So if you have a popular theme as a base and build upon it constantly I think you can achieve an all-time best seller.

If you look at different products like the iPhones for example and compare them to a theme – you will notice that iPhone 1 and iPhone 5s is is the same product – just updated, redesigned etc.

So hypothetically there is a chance an item here will be in the top 10 sellers each week, while the developers are looking after it

Really appreciate all the feedback, and I also believed that the sales would naturally decrease, but how drastic would that decrease be? For example, if a theme sells 500 times in the first month, would the next month sale be much less than that or just a bit less and so on?

I know it would be different for different themes and there are many factors in this, but still I would like to know roughly how it went for your themes, if you are an author; or if you know about any theme and how roughly it’s sales decrease over time.

Pick 50 themes, track their sales weekly for 2 months, and boom — you should have a good idea of drop-off and sales expectations. It’s not rocket science and I’d be surprised if many authors haven’t done it to forecast churn in the slash/burn categories like WordPress.